Okonomi Napolitan

Show your support for Wordsworth proprietor Hiroshi Toda, and for Hiroshima, by voting for Toda’s Okomoni Naopolitan in the Kagome Napolitan Stadium contest!

Italian food is big in Japan and there are many, many restaurants serving high quality authentic Italian cuisine.

It is so popular that some “Italian” dishes have found their way into the Japanese culinary canon. Wa-fu spaghetti (Japanese spaghetti) exemplifies this. A pasta dish found in bistros, family restaurants and kissaten coffee shops across the nation, which features Japanese stock, Japanese mushrooms and is usually topped with strips of dried nori seaweed.

Kagome is Japan’s largest supplier of tomato ketchup and tomato juice, and while tomato sauce is not an ingredient that generally finds its way into Wa-fu spaghetti, Kagome provides the sauce for many a homecooked pasta dish. At this year’s All Japan Furusato Food Fair in Yokohama, the company is hosting a “Neopolitan Stadium” contest, into which chefs from around Japan have submitted their versions of the Neopolitan Spaghetti dish, each with a local twist. On the website there are 16 entries from Hokkaido, Aomori, Miyagi, Ishikawa, Tokyo, Kanagwawa, Ehime, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. as well as one from Shanghai.

The Hokkaido dish features a cream sauce, Nagasaki’s offering incorporates champon ingredients and so forth. Hiroshima’s entry was devised by the owner and head chef at Wordsworth. Hiroshi Toda has blended the italian dish with Hiroshima’s soul food, okonomiyaki. According to the description the dish, which it topped with a friend egg, incorporates okonomiyaki ingredients such as cabbage, pork belly and tenkasu. Added flavor comes from dried fish powder and worchester sauce, mixed with Kagome’s tomato ketchup.

You can vote for Toda’s creation online until November 3. Go to this page and look at the dish in the bottom left corner – it’s the one with the fried egg on top! Click the red button to vote. You’ll be asked to vote via a SNS service such as Facebook or Twitter.

About Us

Joy and Paul Walsh started GetHiroshima in 1999 with the aim of creating an online English language resource to help people enjoy their time in this amazing city to the full. The mission remains the same and, whether you are here for a day or a decade, we hope that GetHiroshima helps you dig that little bit deeper, and get you a little bit closer to the heart of Hiroshima.